OT: VSL acquires new vehicle for its celebrity owner.... Aston Martin? Bugatti? Bentley? Click Baitmobile?

After every six or seven years of hard use I like to sell off my primary work car and get myself something new, fun and (very important) practical to use for my own general transportation. I'd love a cute little sports car like a Miata or an Acura but I still do physical work to earn my living and I need my car to do more than just slip around corners nimbly and sip gas. I need a car that will get me and a couple hundred pounds of photography and/or video gear all over Texas in relative comfort and safety. And I want my car to be economical because buying all of those fun cameras adds up so quickly....

I also want a car that's filled with safety features so I can dodge as many crazy drivers and weird, Texas highway situations as possible. The Honda CR-V (thanks for the years of mostly trouble free service!!!) was a good photographer's car. I enjoyed driving it but it's aged out of modernity and needed to be updated. Also, cars tend to get sloppy over time and I was starting to hear squeaks and rattles that sounded as though they might presage some future maintenance with which I would not want to deal.

I test drove all the small SUVs in the category I think is most effective/efficient and still fun. That includes: the Toyota RAV4, the Mazda CX-5, the AWD CR-V from Honda, the VW Tiguan and even a Mini-Cooper Countryman. But the very last car I test drove was the Subaru Forester. It felt the best. It had the most solid ride, had the best interior layout, and comes with a great reputation for reliability and safety.

I test drove one on a Saturday and then sat down with a sales person to configure my version. All Foresters have the same engine and drive train. You can spend $25K or $35K but you will get the same overall performance. The only options that affect handling are the tires and wheels.

I have had my fill with sun roofs, moon roofs and other useless holes cut into the tops of cars. I don't like them, don't use them and don't want them. I wanted a solid roof.

The Forester I wanted didn't quite exist the day I shopped so we made one. I started with a base model (specifically because it is the only version with no moon roof) added alloy wheels and bigger tires. Added in all the safety features and added a roof rack, and upgraded seats. The dealership did a search and found one configured exactly as I wanted it locally. I went in this morning, test drove it, liked it, bought it and took delivery. I'll need to take the car back to the dealer in a couple of weeks to have the window tints applied. Darker in the back but light enough in the front (driver and passenger) so that a west Texas sheriff will be able to see both of my hands on the steering wheel in the dead of night as he approaches with his .44 magnum drawn and ready...

The car is white. Pearl white. The interior is light gray. I live in Texas and anything I can do to diminish the heat load is a very good idea. That's also why I am adding UV and IR blocking window tint.

The interior space is perfect for a photographer. The lack of a moon roof adds almost an inch and half to the interior height. The rear seats fold down quickly and easily and almost completely flat. A cargo net comes standard. There are ample tie down points in the cargo area. The cargo area and rear seat backs are finished in a thick, black rubber-like material that should hold up well when confronted with big Manfrotto gear cases, gear carts and loose C-Stands.

It's not a race car but it holds its own on the freeway and still gets about the same gas mileage as my old (non-AWD) Honda CR-V. Of course, it's all wheel drive and has the standard 185 horsepower motor and a 7 speed CVT.

The Honda CR-V wasn't all used up yet but the car was handling a lot of emotional baggage for me. It's the car I used to rush to the hospital when my mom went critical. It's the car that helped clean out my parents' forty years of accumulation from their house, and it's the car that's taken me on nearly eighty 150 mile round trips to visit my dad (and his attorneys and accountant) in San Antonio
over the last 13 months. I was starting to have Palovian episodes of depression every time I got in the car lately since it's been the facilitator in my journey of heavy responsibility and, well, grief during the hardest parts of my recent life.

The new car is like a clean sweep. I'm starting from scratch. I'm also starting to rotate cars for trips to San Antonio. Sometimes I'll borrow my wife's Subaru Impreza for the trip. On rare occasions I'll borrow Ben's Toyota Corolla. For bigger business meetings, house sale closings, etc. I generally rent something for the day; like a Suburban or an Audi. I don't want to put the burden on just one car anymore.

The Honda bore the brunt of my long 2018. I'm handing it off to someone for whom its baggage doesn't exist.

I have my first location shoot tomorrow. Not a lot of gear but a fun, local introduction to the car in its support of a photo shoot. I'm already happy.

Least favorite feature: the engine shuts off at stop signs and stops in traffic in order to save on gas.

My most favorite feature: the button that turns off the "feature" that shuts off the engine at stops.

Best interior feature: The driver's seat is great. Some it the visibility.

Back to our regularly delivered programming.

The Best Thing I've Written About Street Photography (I think). A "reprint" from 2010.

Street Shooting. Part One. Why the hell would you want to do that?

    Just hanging out at the Vatican soaking up the ambiance.

For a  generation of old codgers, raised on the images of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and that new upstart, Josef Koudelka, street photography is photography.  Those artists fostered two or three generations of Leica M toting,  Nikon F toting, Tri-X shooting fanatics.  What were these guys thinking?  I guess they were thinking that the world around them was going through tremendous upheavals caused by wars, human migration, the conflict of generations, the smell of the new,  the evolution of fashion and so much more.  And all of it was playing out right there on the streets.

Well, guess what?  The world, right now, is going thru tremendous upheavals caused by wars, human migration, the collapse of the world economy and the move from post industrial service economies to a future we're not sure about yet.  Gee.  It all sounds very familiar.  Except now it's playing out for the most part in front of big screen televisions in the service of endless video games, shopping and social excursions to ubiquitous and homogenous malls and in the sealed, air conditioned cars streaking back and forth from home to mall to quasi-fast food restaurants and back again.  Makes it a lot harder to be a visual "cultural anthropologist" on the street and yet photographers are reconnecting with the old tradition of trying to get a handle on what is "now" by documenting the evidence of their eyes.  Or maybe the thrill of street shooting never left us.........it was just napping through the Flickr age of endless cat whiskers, chunky girls lit by off camera flashes at dusk, and ninja's with smoke machines.

    People at the Termini train station in Rome.

I've absorbed books like, "Why People Photograph" by Robert Adams and I have a huge collection of photo books by Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyons and many, many more.  All of them shot in the streets.  Many of their images are stunning and provocative.  I appreciate them on two levels.  The first is as a time machine to the immediate past.  The descriptive content of these fractions of seconds shows me a time that seems so foreign now and yet it was occuring during my early childhood.  But I appreciate more the well seen graphic images of humanity as a visceral force of emotion and motion.  Flux and decay.

Street photographs are so different than set up photographs.  For some reason I get the impression that millions of "enthusiasts" who, in our father's day, would have been roaming the street and putting in time hoping to become informed observers of the human interplay have abdicated the exterior life in preference for trying to "create" art in their basements and living rooms.  Everything has become so self-referential as though we, as a culture, have lost our ability to attach to things outside our selves or to people outside our isolated, one degree of separation spheres.  We seem to have lost the feeling that we are all part of an interconnected bio system that's interwoven and interdependent, not just physically but also spiritually.  We've become a generation afraid to travel.  Even if it's just travel across town.  Or even fifty feet from our cars.

And so, in some ways, we, the new generation of street photographers, are like explorers out to show the mall and house trapped people what the world outside looks like.  We're trying to show how people exist without cars or credit cards or iPhones or Blackberries or large bank accounts in order, I think, to find the common intersections that will allow us to have renewed faith in the intentions of all the people who seem less like us.  Shooting in the streets gives us access to characters we wouldn't meet in the halls of our normal jobs in white collar America.  It shows an existence without the intangible safety nets of privilege that most of us have hovering below us.  But these images can show the same desire for fun, joy, love, affection and potential that drive us as well.  And by finding the common touchstones of being human we can understand more about ourselves.  

That's the big, philosophical point of view but it's not exactly why I photograph in the street.  I do it because there is some energy there that I'm trying to capture, like a lightning bug in a jar, to take back to an audience I'll never know and show them things in the way in which only I can see things.  I want them to acknowledge that I've looked at things from my very unique perspective and, by showing them, I can help people better understand me.  What my mind must be like. What I think has aesthetic value.  I'm sharing my perspective.  I'm sharing what interest me now.

I don't always photograph people.  Sometimes a Mexican fiesta banner of deep magenta flapping wildly in front of a talkative blue sky is enough to say, "look at what I see."  An altar to Hispanic pop singer, Selena, surrounded by saint candles and flowers allows me to visually shout,  "Do you think this is as weirdly different from my daily life in Austin as I think it is??????"  But the very bottom line,  figured out after years and years of intensive, daily pyscho therapy I've never had is this:  Shooting on the streets gives me a chance, an excuse to walk around and just stare at interesting stuff without having to have a real reason.  And it gives me something to share.

I think the best fiction writers and the best street photographers are the same.  We love to tell stories.  But we don't need to tell the whole story right away.  Sometimes it's better to just tease our audience (and I include myself in my audience) with a snippet that tells a little part of a story but tells it in a way that's so poignant that it's worth savoring in it's unanchored and compartmentalized whole.

Can I tell you a story about "the one that got away" and how it has haunted me ever since?  I was in Russia for a few cold weeks in February of 1995.  The country was in tremendous distress at the time and no one was sure where the next food or money would come from.  Times were very desperate.  But just typing these words makes the scene so banal.  What does desperate really mean?  Everyone's mind and their own history create a subjective mental story when we use words to describe despair.....So let me tell you what I saw.

I left my hotel on Nevsky Prospekt one afternoon with the intention to walk the streets of St. Petersburg and take photographs.  It was so cold you could see the breathe you exhaled ten minutes ago as it formed into snow and gently settled toward the earth.  I was out of place in my western, technical, cold weather gear.  My Contax camera dangling from its neckstrap.  And as I walked down the street the light was fading and becoming a dark and dusky rose color.  Street lights were flickering on and the cars crunched by on hard snow with their little headlights flickering.  

And then I came upon him.  Huddled against the stone wall of one of the ancient gray buildings was an old man.  He was wearing bits and pieces of an old uniform.  I could see a bit of newspaper tucked in around the tops of his worn shoes, put there as extra insulation from the biting cold.  He was worn just like a photos of every sun damaged homeless person living on the streets past a certain age.  His face had deep clefts and his eyes were worn, sad and vague.  Battered by the chill wind of hopelessness. 

He'd lost one arm.  His coat sleeve was pinned up to his shoulder.   This wasn't some faux display to evoke sympathy from tourists because I'll tell you that in the dead of winter in 1995 there weren't any.  At least none that would leave their hotels without chauffeurs, body guards and cars.....And he stood there in the freezing cold.

In front of the man was a very small and delicate wooden table, painted a fading french blue, faded away by time.  On the table was a glass case.  The glass itself was old and filled with romantic imperfections and bubbles.  The seams of the glass case were soldered bronze.  All crude handwork.  The glass case was the size of fairly typical home aquarium.  Inside the case were three littles vases of flowers.  Just two or three stems in two of the vases.  The third held a small bouquet of flowers and the smallest sprig of baby's breath.  In each corner of the case were small, white candles which gave off a peculiar, warm glow.  

I say it was peculiar because the slight warmth of the inside of the case caused just enough condensation to diffuse the candle light as it would be diffused through the living room's winter window of my house back home. The job of the candles was to keep the flowers, and the water they sat in, from freezing.  And as I stood there, riveted by this site the ambient light continued to drop until the streetlights, the daylight and the candles seemed to provide even amounts of illumination and the points of candle flame seemed so much warmer in the purple blanket that was slowly falling through the sky to cover the quiet city.

It was hauntingly beautiful and sad all at once. Deeply sad.  And I couldn't figure out how to include all the pieces of the scene in a frame of film without impinging on the dignity of the old man.  This was his life.  He knew it was his life.  It was all he had.  To photograph it seemed wrong.  It seemed exploitive.  It seemed like trophy hunting.  I left my camera dangling around my neck and I walked over and, in broken Russian, bad French and pantomimed English I bought the small bouquet of flowers.  I paid the man much more than he asked.  He gave me a memory that would haunt me for the rest of my life.  What was that really worth?  What can we ask from others except to make us kinder, more empathetic and more grateful?

What happened to the flowers?  I was out shooting.  I didn't want to carry around flowers.  I walked several more blocks and then turned a corner and gave the flowers to the first young couple I saw.  It was a beautiful day of street shooting and I returned to the hotel without having fired a frame.......

    Detail of the entry lobby at the Alexander Palace in 

    Pushkin, Russia.  1995.